January 2015
VOL XXIII, Issue 1, Number 261
Editor: Klaus J. Gerken
European Editor: Mois Benarroch
Contributing Editors: Jack R. Wesdorp
Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena; Oswald Le Winter; Heather
Ferguson; Patrick White
ISSN 1480-6401
On the 27th January 2015 we will be “celebrating” the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the notorious
Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. As time marches on, there are fewer and fewer people alive who
were first-hand witnesses of these horrors, and the physical history begins to melt into mythology. Few
young people today truly grasp the nature of the brutality of the Nazi regime, and the voices of
Holocaust deniers mutter in the background, gaining credence among an admittedly small minority...
but one has to remember that the National Socialist Party of Germany had only a very small
membership just a decade before Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
As a “half-Jew”, born in the early 1960s, whose grandparents escaped the pogroms in the Ukraine and
Romania, just as Hitler was rising to power in Germany, I recognize that just one small twist of fate and
there would have been no-one writing to you right now. My grand-parents could easily have suffered
the same fate as many of their brothers and sisters.
As a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s I was profoundly disturbed by the re-emergence of the
extreme right wing in the UK and Europe, and in the early 1990s, as I watched the collapse of Socialism
around the world it seemed to me that the soil was now fertile for further growth of extreme right wing
groups. Even in Scotland, normally a staunch Labour stronghold, I wondered if the growing call for
Independence could not be subverted by Nationalist zealots. Add to all that, a climate of pre-millennial
fear, marked out by freak weather and an increase in the frequency of Earthquakes around the world
and there you have the background picture to my poetry sequence, “A Burnt Offering”, the first draft of
which I wrote on 27th January 1995 (the 50th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau).
In light of the recently rapid and disturbing growth of support for extreme right wing parties throughout
Europe, the rise of anti-semitism (once again) and the increase in the number of holocaust-denial
websites all over the internet, I think it is very important to remind people what happened, because if
we forget – and in a few generations it could easily be forgotten – it may well happen again.
Dee Sunshine
A Burnt Offering
27th
January 1995:
The 50th
Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
1.
You covered up the mirrors,
not wanting to see the radiance dissipating:
The sexless city sucking you in,
erasing your face.
Without reflection
we clutched at each other:
clinging together like little children.
We clung together
till gravity pulled us apart.
* * *
Junked out on television
we watched the world disintegrating
in raptures of violent dreams:
each dreamer being so much less
than the sum of the parts;
each dream, a fragment
deconstructed from the whole.
* * *
The sirens and screams
that shredded the night’s silence
were a forewarning
of the worst that would come.
We could sense the beast’s breath
bubbling under the skin of the earth.
* * *
Fucking to the hot dark rhythms of the night
we allowed ourselves the luxury of entropy,
the muted ecstasy of mutual extinction:
it wasn’t love, but its fire kept us warm.
* * *
In sleep we would lose ourselves,
let loose shadowy spectres -
abominations that slithered
through the ragged gashes
in the veneer of our sanity;
trailing a terrible afterbirth,
foetid and reeking of fear.
Our dreams gave birth to
walled in ghettoes,
bloody towers,
children without eyes,
animal corpses,
beggars, mobs,
freight trains...
armies of the dead.
* * *
Waking to the lightless morning:
lost to each other, lost to the detritus
of fear filled dreams,
we would shiver, cling together
and fill each other’s ears
with the hot blood
of promised tomorrows.
2.
In holding together and clutching
we imagined ourselves to be whole -
sublimated in a spurious spirituality,
elevated above the chaos of spiky rooftops
and darkly smoking chimneys.
But the sky blew through our every construct,
insinuating a secret hunger, infecting us
with the knowledge of our fragility.
We were held together by mere fragments -
broken pieces that could never be anything more
than broken pieces.
3.
Sometimes, standing skeletal
in the rusted metal wind,
with clouds clearing from frosted skies,
a blur of stars dazzling our eyes,
we would be surprised
by something bigger than love.
Momentarily the futility would fall away
and we’d taste that ineffable no-thing
with an undefined inner sense.
Transcending the linear,
we would cross the border
without passports or maps.
4.
The night before you left we tore the clothes from each other
and pulled our loins together:
it was a last frantic attempt at connection
before our final separation.
In the deliberate darkness -
not wanting to see
what we’d lost in each other -
we thrashed to an angry climax.
You were a Nazi storm trooper
and I, a sub-human Jew.
5.
Last night I sat shivering at my desk watching the moon track across the sky
listening to screech owls
yammering in the distance,
the wind muttering to the trees,
the silence from my unsleeping bed.
Tonight I cannot pretend I’ll sleep.
In the double-glazed safety of suburbia
I cannot excuse this agitation:
these solid buildings nurse the spirit
to slumbering, willing forgetfulness.
But I cannot forget you:
your post-war, housing scheme passions
assail me from across the great divide,
shaking me to my very foundations.
Your ice blue eyes
are watching me as I squirm -
you torturer, you.
I miss you!
I am at a loss out here,
on the periphery of prosperity
with this job, this house,
this security:
I miss our days and nights
of unemployed reckless penury.
I miss the neon emptiness,
the dirty knickers,
the one bar electric fire,
the stinking fridge,
the anonymous screams
in the death still night,
the nightmares
and our dreams
of a greener, cleaner place.
6.
My heart is acrid as this ashtray, hard as blown glass.
There is no poem to our love:
I remember only
the murmuring of your body against mine
in abstract -
one sideways blow
and the image is cracked.
I need your hands
to pull me out
from this stagnant murk:
I need your Teutonic no-nonsense
To wipe away this Semitic self-pity.
7.
Tonight I am alone,
with no hand to guide me.
Under my feet
the world is trembling,
mountains are moving
to Mohammed’s muezzin call.
Soon the infidel,
will be routed out,
cut down:
devoured in ash and flame.
8.
A postcard from Japan,
a picture of gleaming, erect Osaka -
skyscrapers piercing
a Hiroshima red, sunset sky.
On the back it reads, I am alive and well,
if a little shaken.
My brave, adventuring friend,
but a butterfly’s kiss from Kobe:
she says, don’t worry,
but I do.
Drunk on my father’s brew
of cynicism and anxiety,
I watch the storm clouds gathering,
drawing near
and I’m filled full
of wretched fear.
These islands, he once mused,
are but wretched specks in a vast wilderness;
and these oceans,
just a dribble of sweat
rolling down the buttock cleft
of an indifferent deity.
My father knew
the heart of his father God
even before his bar mitzvah day:
he was but ten
when the news filtered through
from Poland and Germany.
9.
The struggle of people against power
Is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera
Sleepless,
these flickering images of newsreel
strobe blue in the late night corners
of this hallucinated, tangled room:
random, uncollated images
of collateral damage;
names colliding
in a jangling discordant poetry –
Angola, Sarajevo, Eritrea,
East Timor, Cambodia,
Haiti, Soweto, Kuwait...
an endless litany of forgotten places
like the dispassionate whisper
of a distant, voiceless God.
Here, great Jehovah,
are the bits of a child
who stood on a land mine.
Here is the skull
of a prisoner
who had nothing to confess.
Here are the bodies
of women and children
who were queuing
at the well for water.
Here, there and everywhere
uncountable numbers,
unfathomable numbers:
I would tattoo them
on your loving arms,
Dear God.
10.
My great aunt - my grandmother’s elder sister - is over fifty years dead:
no exact record exists,
but somewhere in Hamburg or Hanover
her skin still shades the harsh light of a naked bulb.
Perhaps, that is all that remains of her.
The books that were bound
by the glue made from her pulverised bones
have long since been read and discarded;
and the soap made from her body fat
was used up
scrubbing clean
the blackened faces
of Aryan coal miners.
11.
I learned the necessity of lies early on:
picking up a penny in the playground
there was a momentary flush of joy,
but it was soured by classmates
who gathered round, taunting me,
calling me - a fucking Jew.
The half-Jewish blood
in my veins
boiled in shame.
12.
Twenty-five years ago, this very night,
I sat by the muttering gas fire,
in the blue light of the television
and the shadow of my father’s chair.
It was then that I hardened my heart,
for I was tormented by his weeping.
13.
Weep not,
for the dead are but dead
and the past is always passing
further and further over
the ever-receding horizon.
14.
Under the eiderdown I twist
like a colony of maggots
eating the last scant remains
of a corpse.
I am cocooned against
the January frost,
waiting for the watery dawn,
wishing this knot of cloth
was a chrysalis -
that I’d burst forth
from these dark dregs
into a wondrous and kindly light.
The clock on the mantle shelf
savages the last vestiges
of the night’s silence,
ticking its fascist beat,
dragging me ever onwards.
Malign,
its number fragmented face mocks:
its tic-toc like the rocking of railway carriages
and the tarnished laughter of Polish permafrost;
its hollow echo like the passing of freight wagons
through war torn, crumbling factory towns.
This clock,
with its bland, smug face,
measures the pulse
with the clinical precision of Mengele.
15.
The same sea in us all,
but waves breaking
on different shorelines.
Drunken footfalls
on the stair head
mark the passing
from night to dawn:
the clock laughing,
its hollow pedantry
as celebration reaches
inevitable anti-climax.
I wait for the door to open,
the return of the revellers,
my sisters and brothers:
one flesh,
but waves breaking on different shores.
Belatedly, the feast
has been consumed.
Dry mouths have slaked their thirst
with dry waters;
16.
Hark, the heroes are returned!
Drunken and clamouring,
their voices raised and roused:
glorious, victorious
and, by the way,
totally fucking stocious.
The Saltire flies high,
blowing in the wind
of nationalist pride.
The Sassenachs
are once again routed:
slain by the true might
of Burns and Bruce.
With haggis and neeps in the belly
and the power of whisky
on their tongues, they ask
wha’s like us?
These true blue pure-blooded
xenophobic Scots.
Has the bagpipe’s wail
deafened their ears?
For none among them can hear
the same sea
which moves within us all.
17.
It's not as many miles as you imagine
from Nuremberg to Hampden:
the cross is easily crooked.
When the soul is bled dry
there is nothing left
but the braying of empty minds.
18.
Four fifteen, a forest of broken crucifixes,
flags, effigies,
the reek of stale beer
in half drunk cans:
I fix a coffee
in the crematorial kitchen,
resigning myself
to lack of sleep.
The celebrations are over
and darkened rooms
are littered with snoring:
making my solitude,
my sleeplessness,
all the more poignant.
In the broken wind
I hear black Lilith laughing:
Schottland Schottland
über alles.
Ich bin unbeweglich.
19.
Back in those halcyon days
when her nest floated upon a calm sea
my mother would lull me to sleep, singing
Silent night, holy night,
All is still, all is quiet.
Back then, I believed
in the perfection of peace.
20.
Finally, I am arisen, like a phoenix from the ashes of the night: I wipe the sleeplessness from my eyes
and discard my bleached out, striped pyjamas
in a ragged, loveless heap,
like so much worn out Jew-flesh.
Out the window, the snow has turned to rain
and a thin line of watery daylight
has lain itself across the horizon.
Sat at my desk, I scrape my pen
across the stiff white parchment
of my leather-bound writing book
and cannot suppress the image
of Jewish skin -
it creeps upon me
with a Semitic tenacity,
sending into the penumbra
any Burnsian sentiments
that might be lurking
in the Scottish parts
of my bastard blood.
21.
Is it my bastard blood
which makes me fear
my country’s cry for nationhood?
What is this Scotland?
Is it not just a mass of land,
part of an island,
conquered by robber barons
whose bloodthirsty mouths
declared themselves kings?
Who are these Scots
that claim this nation?
Are they Picts, Celts and Norse?
Britons, Angles and Saxons?
Italians, Irish and Jews?
African, Chinese and Asian?
What line divides
the waves of immigrants
who have settled
on this fragment of island?
Whose hand divines
the right to be?
Who is Scottish, exactly?
Who can call this crag of rock
their homeland...
and for whom will only
arbeit macht frie?
22.
Ich bin, ich bin:
in the loveless dark,
in the icy January rain,
in a silent cold rage;
there is a swastika
where my heart used to be.
My love, my love,
what has become of me?
23.
Weary gunmetal dawn,
a miasma of monochrome:
the wind is stilled
and leaden rain
like dull crystal
softly splinters
on slush stained pavements.
24.
Here I am,
within the soulless framework
of technology,
filled with the rhythm
and hot impulses
of our time.
Herr Goebbels,
your ghost moves
in the salt wind,
whistling through
rusted metal
skeletal cranes,
raw rasping
Teutonic laughter -
Ich höre Sie.
These abandoned docks bordering the cold wastes
of the northern sea,
my footprints alone
in the grey snow,
but across the waters
and across time,
your voice
following me.
No solace
in the dark sodium light
of this unpeopled hour.
Across the waters,
across time,
your voice is
a thousand broken windows,
a tongue of fire.
smoking chimneys,
a black leather zeitgeist.
From Zyklon B
to bunker suicide -
you see, Herr Goebbels,
tomorrow belongs to no-one.
25.
Among the carnage of yesterday and the carnage of tomorrow
what hope is there for today?
What hope
for this dismal grey morning?
Without you, my love,
there is no love.
Without you,
there is no God
to oversee this chaos.
26.
These tomorrows, these yesterdays -
if you were here now
they would all be consumed
in the pyre of our passion play.
These flags,
these abstract arbitrary divisions,
would be wiped away.
The slate would be clean:
no scribbled saltire,
no tricolour or union jack
would sully its perfect blackness.
There’d be no star of David
muddying the sky,
no crescent moon.
All would be dissolved
in the fire of our Shiva-Shakti.
All would be undone
in the tender loop of love.
If you were here
I’d be blinded to unbelieving eyes.
No more would I see
this scorched skin,
these skeletons in stained shrouds
of striped cloth.
If you were here
I’d believe in a listening God:
one who heard the trains,
one who tasted the sweat,
the sorrow, the bitter ash
of Auschwitz-Birkenau;
one who could conjure up rainbows
and promise a perfect new tomorrow.
Dee Sunshine is a writer, artist and perennial traveler. His father is Jewish and many of his great Aunts
and Uncles perished in Nazi concentration camps during the 2nd World War. He wrote the first draft of
“A Burnt Offering” twenty years ago, on the 50th Anniversary of The Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
and spent a decade re-writing it. Extracts from it have been previously published in a number of
magazines and the whole sequence is featured in his third collection of poetry, “Visions Of The
Drowning Man”. Dee has a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Sunshine.Visions and a website at
www.thunderburst.co.uk
All selections are copyrighted by their respective authors. Any
reproduction of
these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is
prohibited.
YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2015 by
Klaus J. Gerken.
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